On January 16 th , US communications behemoth Comcast (owner of NBCUniversal) held an investors day to provide much-needed clarity around its forthcoming direct-to-consumer (D2C) service Peacock. Of the big four D2C services due to launch in a 12-month period between H2 2019 and H2 2020, Peacock is the late entrant – but potentially the one with the biggest disruptive impact.

Neatly ahead of Spotify’s Q4 earnings, Amazon has taken the rare step of announcing subscriber metrics for Amazon Music (inclusive of Prime Music and Music Unlimited). Amazon Music closed 2019 with 55 million ‘customers’ across free and paid.

How to describe YouTube? The now-15-year old video platform does not fit into a single box, but rather ticks all of them. Its positioning between consumer and business is a fascinating one, replicated in reach and capacity by no other platform.

2020 promises to be a big year for direct-to-consumer (D2C) services, with Warner Media’s HBO Max and Comcast’s Peacock set to join Apple TV+ and Disney+ in the battle to win streaming audience share both in the US and beyond.

The podcast market – as with all media ­– is going through dramatic change, stretching the very meaning of what podcasts even are. To understand this fast-changing market, it is important to think outside of the constraints of traditional lenses as they can obscure the bigger picture.

When Journey’s song Don’t Stop Believin’ was originally released as the second single from the album Escape in 1981, it was a modest US chart hit (Billboard Hot 100 no. 9). Fast forward 28 years, in 2009 the track had two very prominent syncs: The Sopranos finale and Glee (the song featured in six episodes).

Last week we published a blog post highlighting some initial findings from our inaugural quarterly podcast tracking data. The results show Spotify in a leading position as a standalone platform, Apple Podcasts second and national broadcaster apps doing well.

Q3 2019 was a quarter of mixed fortunes for Spotify, with its subscriber base displaying consistent growth, podcasts making a solid early showing, emerging markets demonstrating promise but ad revenue falling short.

The podcast platform data from MIDiA’s Q4 tracker is in. These are the high-level findings (you can read more about our methodology here ): Apple still leads overall:  A recent report showed that Spotify has become the leading podcast platform in the US.

CES, the big annual consumer tech show, is underway in Las Vegas. Unlike in most previous years, there has been little in the way of big new announcements. This is in large part because we are reaching a degree of maturity in the consumer landscape, with big new developments being replaced by smaller, sustaining innovations.

2019 audience figures for Formula One (F1) provide the latest example of a rights holder opting for short-term revenue optimisation over long-term strategic growth, to the detriment of its viewing audience.

Netflix, the current subscription video on demand (SVOD) global leader, has topped Wikipedia searches for the second week of 2020 with its new fantasy scripted drama original,  The Witcher . The show is based upon a story universe created by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski, which originated in novel form and has since morphed into –  among other adaptations –  a hugely popular game franchise with 40 million unit sales to date.

Soon we will probably all have home speakers, whether we like them or not. They are starting to appear almost out of the ether, much like the classic double-sized Sports Direct mugs everyone had in their student flats but no one remembered ever acquiring.

This Saturday at 1am GMT BT will debut its live broadcast for WWE Smackdown, having acquired the exclusive rights from long-term UK broadcaster Sky in June 2019 . This signalled the end of Sky’s tenure as the home of WWE content, which first began broadcasting wrestling coverage to fans back in the 1980s with WWF.

Less than a week into the new decade and we already have the first indications that the streaming rulebook continues to be rewritten faster than the ink can dry on its last entry. Three separate articles, on the surface unrelated, when stitched together create the outline of a new streaming narrative that while firmly rooted in recent developments represents an entirely new chapter for the music industry: Ellie Goulding’s ‘River’ was the UK Christmas number one despite being an Amazon exclusive Jimmy Iovine claims Drake and Billie Eilish each have more streams than the entirety of the 1980s UK streaming revenue growth slowed, adding £191 million in 2019 compared to £210 million in 2019 Fusing consumption and retail Streaming’s impact is both commercial and cultural, in large part because it fuses what used to be retail and radio.

This Monday Netflix quietly announced a new strategic partnership with potentially far-reaching ramifications for how it weathers the direct-to-consumer (D2C) storm of 2020. The December 30 th   press release  officially announced the production and output deal agreed on November 21 st  2019 between Netflix and Studio Dragon, a production company owned by CJ ENM, a leading Korean media company spanning Korean TV and film and K-Pop.

Applying economics to music often invites groans from music fans, but here goes…. The recorded music market is currently worth $18.8 billion dollars a year, and thanks to streaming that number is growing.

Ever since the English Premier League (EPL) awarded rights to tech major Amazon in June 2018, the excitement for December 2019 and how Amazon’s live stream delivery would pan out has been palpable. The EPL has long prioritised revenue over reach when entertaining rights bids, but this legacy approach is approaching an inflection point; its addressable audience is ageing, increasing the importance of striking a distribution deal with a digital outlet in order to target younger demographics.